Macs making inroads in the corporate sphere

The Mac is a better choice than ever for business tasks besides photo …

Walk into any decent-sized company that has more than four or five Macs, and you're likely to notice a pattern: they're only used by the creative departments, and reluctantly (if at all) managed by corporate IT. Sounds familiar to some of you, I'm sure.

However, with the switch to Intel chips and the advent of better solutions for Windows compatibility that come with it, this might be starting to change. That's the premise of a pair of articles from MacNewsWorld and PC Magazine discussing the slow migration of Macs into other business segments. According to the pieces, there are a few things driving the increase in business Mac spending:

More companies are using web-based applications for their day-to-day tasks, and rely less on proprietary software

The OS has become dramatically more reliable since the OS 9 days, meaning less downtime

The apparently constant need to battle viruses and malware on the Windows platform (for the record, I don't think this is as big a deal as it's commonly portrayed, so save your e-mails)

The ability of Macs to now run actual Windows applications through Parallels, Boot Camp, VMWare, or other virtualization technologies

An increase in Mac ownership among college students, leading to more familiarity with the platform for new entrants into the job-seeking world

There's also another issue that isn't mentioned in either piece. With the release of Windows Vista, IT departments are faced with a choice they haven't had to make for five years: do we upgrade our PCs, or do we switch? Okay, most are going to choose to upgrade, but the prospect of at least adding a Mac here or there is a lot easier to contemplate in 2007 than it was six years ago, when Windows XP and Mac OS X v10.1 were duking it out.

Let's be honest: things aren't going to be like they were in the early '80s when people bought Apple IIs just to run VisiCalc, but with a new platform and a new push, Apple might at least improve its foothold on the corporate world.